Recommendations from our site
“The Cyberiad is an epic cycle of short stories about the adventures of two robot friend-enemies. There’s the robot Trurl, who is a master inventor of techno-magical devices, and there’s Klapaucius, who is always there to poke holes in Trurl’s wildly ambitious projects. The bickering duo fly through the cosmos in a completely fantastical, science-fictional world, and they have all these adventures…I wanted to include it because rereading Lem’s wacky, linguistically brilliant cycle of stories invites us to think about the essence of OpenAI and Anthropic’s large language models. They’re scraping up Western civilization’s dominant texts and absorbing their specific worldview – because AI obviously doesn’t have that many female’s or poor people’s or black people’s or brown people’s texts to work with. LLMs amplify knowledge, but not everyone’s knowledge. Lem captures this — satirically, I might add. I would challenge readers: go back and read The Cyberiad in the age of AI. It feels like this weird ‘aha’ moment.” Read more...
The Best Eastern European Sci Fi
Yvonne Howell, Literary Scholar
